Communion: A True Story (6 page)

I decided that I wanted to move to Austin. I went to the University of Texas there, and it is a city that both Anne and I love. Some of our best friends, including my collaborator James Kunetka, live there.

I insisted on putting both the cabin and the apartment on the market.

After Halloween we went down to Texas and arranged for our son to attend a local private school and began the process of buying a house.

We got an offer on our cabin, but no interest in the apartment.

One evening in Austin we were looking at the house we had chosen to buy. My wife was inside talking to the realtor and the owners. I walked out onto the deck.

When I looked at the dark canyon that stretched out into the shadows, and the stars in the evening sky, I felt suddenly and absolutely afraid. It was exactly as if the sky were a living thing, and it was watching me.

What was even more frightening was my clear awareness that this was a paranoid fantasy.

I thought then that my mental health was not good, and soon I would either have to calm down or take steps to Improve it.

But I could not live in that house. In fact, I could never enter it again.

When I changed my mind and decided to stay in New York, my wife was understandably furious. Then I accused her of being the one who had wanted to move us to Austin.

There followed a crisis. She really thought that she might have to leave me, because life together was just getting intolerable. But we are a deep marriage, and her despairing threat to separate made me quell my extreme behavior. It was not until Christmas that I really began to feel better.

Sitting in my office that afternoon in February I took stock of all I had found out. I had promised Hopkins that I wouldn't read anything about unidentified flying objects. In the past, as I have said, my interest in the subject was minimal. I have certainly read a book or two about them. Pressing myself I thought maybe I could remember seeing something years ago in Look magazine about somebody named Hill being taken aboard a flying disk. (In July 1986 I got copies of the issues involved — October 4 and 18, 1966-and I do not think that I actually read them at the time. I must have seen something about the story, though, because I remember it. Maybe there was a report in the newspaper.)

Judging from what the other witnesses reported, something had happened. But what?

Even after talking to Hopkins, I was by no means willing to ascribe my experiences to the UFO phenomenon. I wanted to be quite clear: I had no idea what had gone on that night.

There did seem to be a lot of confusion, though, and perhaps even an emotional response on my part greatly out of proportion to what seemed a minor disturbance.

TWO

O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

And wonder what you've missed.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

-
W. H. AUDEN
,

"As I Walked Out One Evening"

DOWN THE CAVE OF MIND

Hypnosis 
The Uncertain Mirror

My next step was clear. I was going to become involved with a therapist. But I had certain criteria. It could not be somebody who believed anything in particular about visitors or the disk phenomenon. The ideal therapist would have an open mind: I could have a mental problem. It might or might not have components unknown to science. Or it could be just what it seemed.

Because of the evident presence of fear-induced memory lapses and even possible amnesia, this therapist would have to be a skilled hypnotist as well. And again, not just any psychiatrist using hypnosis in his practice would do. I wanted somebody with a reputation in the scientific community as a real expert. I wanted both scientific rigor and therapeutic skill-and the two are not always present in the same person.

I chose not to approach any hypnotist to whom Hopkins had made previous referrals, despite the excellence of their credentials. One of these, Dr. Aphrodite Clamar, had worked extensively with Hopkins and was a very fine and highly professional psychologist, but I was firm in my desire to do this with somebody who had had no previous involvement.

Hopkins remembered that Dr. Donald Klein of the New York State Psychiatric Institute had expressed interest in the phenomenon and appeared to be open-minded about it. I looked up Dr. Klein's credentials and found them to be superb. If he would take me on, he was the ideal man.

A few weeks later I was in his office undergoing a searching three-hour pre-interview. I had provided him with a document outlining all my memories. We worked for some time trying to find ways into my mind, but I could recall little more than I already had. At his suggestion, I spent a week trying to do so. When I was not successful — in fact, all I got out of it was dizziness and strange nightmares — we decided on a trial hypnosis session.

I was dubious about hypnosis. I'd read in
Science News
of a study that suggested that anybody under hypnosis can be induced to remember a "UFO abduction and experience,"

complete with little men and all the trimmings. The hypnotist has only to ask the right questions. and the stories apparently just come pouring out.

It is a flat-out myth that people can't lie under hypnosis. They can and they will — if they think that's what the hypnotist wants them to do, or if they themselves want to do it.

When I got a more careful look at the study I had read about in
Science News
, I found that the questions asked were intentionally leading ones, specifically designed to evoke abduction memories. This study had as its purpose to prove that anybody can be induced to relate an abduction experience under hypnosis if he or she is asked questions designed to suggest that the hypnotist wanted him or her to relate such an experience.

Well, there was no chance at all that Dr. Klein was going to do that. This can easily be confirmed by the reader, as all the transcripts of my hypnosis sessions are verbatim. And I was very much hoping that the process would dispel the whole notion of the visitors and prove that — despite appearances — the experience had been a complicated series of misperceptions.

Still, the study illustrated a very good point and revealed a fundamental difficulty even with serious and competent efforts to use hypnosis in dealing with this sort of material.

We just don't know enough about hypnosis to call it a completely trustworthy scientific toot in a situation like this. While Don Klein certainly didn't ask provocative questions, there is always the possibility that I was unconsciously eager to comply with an outcome that I might secretly have longed for. I might wont powerful visitors to appear, to save a world that I'm pretty sure is in serious trouble. I'd spent the past three years working on books about nuclear war and environmental collapse. I knew full well that we are going to have a really rough time in the next fifty years. Maybe the idea of visitors coming along and saving our necks was more appealing to me than I might consciously have wished to admit. Maybe I hid my desperation from myself in order to live and raise a child with anything like a happy heart.

What I can say in favor of these transcripts is that they represent the response of an honest man to the efforts of a recognized expert in the field of medical hypnosis.

One of the greatest challenges to science in our age is from morn superstitions such as UFO cults and people who are beginning to take instruction from space brothers. Charlatans ranging from magicians to "psychic healers" have tried to gather money and power for themselves at the expense of science. And this is tragic. When one looks at the vast dollars that go each year to the astrology industry and thinks what that money would have done for us in the hands of astronomers and astrophysicists, it is possible to feel very frustrated. Had the astronomers been awash in these funds, perhaps they would have already solved the problem that I am grappling with now. I respect astrology in its context as an ancient human tradition. Still, I wish the astronomers could share royalties from the astrology books.

I did not believe in UFOs at all before this happened. And I would have laughed in the face of anybody who claimed contact. Period. I am not a candidate for conversion to any new religion that involves belief in benevolent space brothers, or in unidentified flying objects as the craft of intergalactic saints — or sinners.

And yet my experience happened to me, and much of it is recorded not in an unconscious context but in ordinary memory. If we are dealing with a new system of beliefs on its way to becoming fixed into religious dogma, the way the religion is in my case emerging, right into the middle of a mind with no obvious allegiance to it at all, suggests that real belief could be a totally misunderstood
biological
process capable of occasionally issuing forth from some extraordinary and unsuspected structure of the brain far more concrete than Jung's collective unconscious. Thus, even if visitor experiences are an essentially mental phenomenon, to laugh at them or dismiss them as some known form of abnormal behavior when they obviously are not is in effect to be silent before the presence of the new. Science should bring its best efforts to this, which means good studies that proceed from open and skillfully drawn hypotheses.

If mine is a real experience of visitors, it is among the deepest and most extensive as yet recorded, and I hope it will be of value if they emerge. If it is an experience of something else, then I warn you: This "something else" is a power within us, maybe some central power of the soul, and we had best try to understand it before it overcomes objective efforts to control it.

What follows here are two transcripts of hypnotic regressions, covering my buried memories of October 4 and December 26, 1985. That these are buried memories and not imaginations worked out in the doctor's office seems hard to dispute. The mechanism that buried them is no different from that which places any particularly terrifying experience behind a wall of amnesia. Beginning with Freud, the process of screen memory has been extensively documented.

The hypnosis used on me was not qualitatively different from that used on police witnesses. And the same caveats that apply to police cases apply to this case — those and no others. It should be remembered, though, that — even given my earnest effort — I am describing what I perceived, which may or may not have been what was actually there. We really do not have enough experience with our reaction to extreme strangeness to know how we alter such memories.

Donald Klein met me in his subdued gray office on East Seventy-ninth Street in Manhattan. He is a tall man with curly hair and a quiet demeanor. Two things were immediately apparent to me about him as a hypnotist. First, I sensed command; he was confident of his skills. Second, he was a thorough, careful man with a very acute mind.

I had never been hypnotized before, and I was apprehensive about it. As it turned out, my apprehension was for the wrong reasons. I was afraid of relinquishing control over myself, which seemed deeply disturbing. Control, as may be imagined, was a central issue in a life such as the one I had been leading.

I found, though, that I trusted Don Klein when he told me that even under hypnosis people cannot be readily compelled to say things they do not want to say. I would not be out of control, not really.

The process of becoming hypnotized was pleasant. I sat in a comfortable chair. Dr. Klein stood before me and asked me to look up at his finger, which was placed so that I had almost to roll my eyes into my head to see it. He moved it from side to side and suggested that I relax. No more than half a minute lacer, it seemed, I was unable to hold my eyes open. Then he began saying that my eyelids were getting heavy, and they did indeed get heavy. The next thing I knew, my eyes were closed.

At that point I felt relaxed and calm, but not asleep. I was aware of my surroundings. I could feel my face growing slack, and soon Dr. Klein began to say that my right hand was getting warm. It got warm, and then he progressed to my arm, and then my whole body. I was now sitting, totally comfortable, encased in warmth. I still felt as if I had a will of my own, a sensation that was never to leave me. In fact, the hypnotized subject does have a will of his own, very much so. But he is also open to suggestion.

After some preliminary questions, preparing me by asking me to recall my birthday and then Labor Day weekend, Dr. Klein proceeded to the afternoon of October 4. I wish to add that Budd Hopkins was present at both of these sessions, recording them. He was allowed to ask questions, but only at the end of each session, and it was understood that his questions would be few. They are identified with his name in the transcripts. All other questions were put by Dr. Klein.

Events of October 4, 1985

SESSION DATE:
March 1, 1986

SUBJECT:
Whitley Strieber

PSYCHIATRIST:
Donald Klein, MD

[This is an actual transcript of my first hypnosis. Nothing has been left out. This is what happened when my memories were examined under hypnotic regression.

Dr. Klein began the session with Labor Day. As I grew more comfortable with the process of remembering, he drew me closer to the night in question.]

"Now, we're going forward a little further, to the beginning of the month of October.

Right around October first, 1985. Can you tell me where you are right now?"

"Yeah, I'm working on the Russian book."

"What book?"

"The Russian book."

"What's that?"

"It's a novel about Russia. I've got a good idea I'm working on the Russian book."

"Where are you?"

"I'm at home in the city."

"You have any plans for the weekend?"

"Yeah, we're gonna take Jacques and Annie up to the country and I don't know whether or not Jacques is going to fit in the jeep."